Abstract: This issue highlights multiple methodologies that capture how women renegotiated assumptions about proper gender, class, and race relationships in North America and the transatlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We open with two approaches to the domestic as a context for gender challenge in the 1920s and 1930s. Stephanie Smith, in "The Painter and the Communist," follows the career of the peripatetic US artist Ione Robinson and her short stay in Mexico City in the late 1920s. In Mexico's postrevolutionary era, the city was a lively transnational hub for artists, writers, philosophers, and art historians. Drawn to its artistic scene, Robinson arrived in Mexico City in the late 1920s, where she ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the spring of 1931, the painter Ione Robinson wrote her husband, the writer and prominent communist Joseph Freeman, to justify why she no longer desired to be married. According to Robinson, as a "selfish" woman, she "never pretended to be other than an artist." Even more compelling, she continued, "I am miserable when I am caught like a bird in a cage." For Robinson, then, being an artist and a wife simultaneously represented incompatible roles, and she soon fled her home. At the time of Robinson's note, a mere two years had passed since the couple first met while living in Mexico City. Although Robinson admitted in her letter to Freeman that she once loved him dearly, more than "anything in this world," within ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: On a March day in 1937, ten members of the League of Women Shoppers (LWS) "stepped out vigorously" to join a picket line in front of a Washington, DC, factory belonging to the National Pants Company. These ten well-to-do activists had come to lend their support to cutters and pressers on strike for union recognition, higher pay, and shorter hours. The LWS volunteers distributed a leaflet explaining that they belonged to "a newly organized group of women who believe that consumer pressure is an effective means of raising working standards." They also shouldered picket signs declaring "The Washington League of [Women] Shoppers protests conditions in this shop!" and "A living wage for all!"1The LWS picketers proudly ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Maria Stewart in the 1830s and Sojourner Truth in the 1850s were not the only African American women who took to the stage to protest the evils of slavery and the problems they faced in society. African American women's presence lent the antislavery movement credibility and emotional weight as they were able to testify directly about the impact of slavery and racism on their lives and their families. Many women's antislavery organizations were integrated long before the larger men's organizations. African Americans' participation in mixed-race antislavery organizations was not always met with acceptance.1 Although some white antislavery activists demonstrated their commitment to equality in both word and deed ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Scholars and public intellectuals recently marked the fifty-year anniversaries of three path-breaking books written by American women in the early 1960s: Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963).1 The writers recalled the women's unflinching depictions of the harms committed by leading American professions and industries and lauded them for their efforts. Jacobs excoriated architects and planners who destroyed cities in the name of urban renewal, while Carson rebuked industrial chemists who loaded life forms and landscapes with pesticides in a delusional bid to place nature under human control. Friedan ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Ever since Roe v. Wade, opponents of legal abortion have invoked women's history to justify themselves. A group called Feminists for Life (FFL) first came up with the idea that the founders of the women's rights movement, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had opposed abortion and "worked to outlaw" it. FFL saw their historical vision widely adopted in the Right-to-Life movement in the early 1990s as it tried to appeal to younger women with pro-woman and "women-protective" arguments. When a political action committee was formed in 1993 to support anti-choice candidates, it doubled down on this historical claim by calling itself the Susan B. Anthony List. But FFL and kindred groups have played ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Farming women in North America have rarely been given full consideration in all their complexity in scholarly literature. Narratives have most often chronicled and identified men as farmers, landowners, and members of farming organizations. The works reviewed in this essay probe those historical silences and speak to women's experiences as agriculturalists, landowners, and active, engaged members of farm-oriented organizations to reveal the impact of gender, identity, and ideology on the formation of agrarian life.Drawing from cartoons, films, photographs, and personal correspondence, Nancy K. Berlage's 2016 work Farmers Helping Farmers adeptly weaves an exploration of local farm and home bureau organizations into ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 2010, one of my brightest undergraduate thesis students moved from Washington, DC, to London to pursue a master's in history at University College London. As an undergraduate, she had been a politically committed member of the campus women's movement who occasionally engaged in militant action, as when she and a group of comrades dumped hundreds of copies of the student newspaper in front of the paper's editorial office under a sign that read "No room for rape apologists" in a protest against an editorial by a member of its staff who dismissed the seriousness of date rape. Her politics were leftist as well as feminist, and when she arrived in Bloomsbury, she decided to attend a meeting of the Socialist Workers ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: These four recent books on second wave feminism raise compelling theoretical and methodological questions while also providing a wealth of information about women's activism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chief among them is how to define second wave feminism itself; Janet Allured, as well as Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson offer critiques of the wave metaphor for how it tends to elide women's activism that does not align neatly with the crests of women's suffrage and second wave feminism. Yet, Malony and Nelson retain the term "second wave" within quotation marks because of its historical significance and widespread use in the historiography of feminism; their volume seeks to "fill in the ... Read More Keywords: Robinson, Ione,; Freeman, Joseph,; Strikes and lockouts; Women; Douglass, S. M.; Antislavery movements; Paul, Susan,; Remond, Sarah Parker,; Women intellectuals; Abortion; Feminism; Pro-life movement; Rote Armee Fraktion; National Women's Conference PubDate: 2019-09-15T00:00:00-05:00
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